Dammit, you guys! Stop it with the cool ideas that are gonna make this take forever to implement

10ebbor10, a few of those ideas are actually in the book! They're also the kinds of interesting and tough tactical decisions that I'd like to have. I'm always afraid of putting the player in a position where he can't possibly recover, but hey, it's his fault he his entire arsenal in the first minutes of the battle!

Flamers: might just do it for the cool effects... but only if a proper graphics artist makes good sprites, otherwise it just looks lame Also, will probably totally degrade research. All AoE weapons should.

Tanker bugs: Oh god! If it does get in, he'll probably be smaller than in the movies, but it'd be a pretty cool thing to go against. And by cool I mean deadly. Deadly as in, everything melts under the lava puke of the deadly beast! Starship Troopers, now 50% more dwarven!

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Bad news: didn't get a lot of time this weekend.Good news: got enough that I managed to implement all things unit selection!

You can now click, double-click and drag for unit selection, all units of same kind selection and box selection, along with all variations given by SHIFT and ALT being pressed. I think that's mostly all the selection tools anyone will want. Might implement control groups at some point - should be fairly trivial.

This means we're getting a whole lot closer to this becoming an actual game. I'm wondering where to go next. Perhaps I can flesh out the Bugs a little bit and make some very basic cheating AI for this to have some actual gameplay.

The problem is I can't really develop the Terrans much further until I know more about them. I'm still not clear exactly how Terran reinforcements/resources are going to work. What resources are used to build more bases/buildings? How do you get them? I'm not a fan of the RTS fare of drones harvesting deposits; I much prefer capture points like WH40k, Company of Heroes, Cossacks 2, etc. Not sure if that would work very well in 1 dimension though. So I don't know what to do about that.

And with that, we move on to our new regular segment, which details what needs doing the most!

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The needs of the Terran Federation:- Game design: flesh out Terran resources and Terran resource gathering. Control points that give resources, reinforcements over time as more Terran Fleet ships arrive, or just plain regular constant reinforcements over time?- Playtesting: It'd be real nice if somebody would playtest this on their computer. It should work on both Linux and Windows, you just need to install Python and PySFML (I'll post instructions in OP). Just let me know what is working for you, what isn't, and how many FPS you are getting under what specs. There's a ton of really significant optimisations I can do, but I'm trying to leave those for later.- Graphics design: as usual, this really needs someone to take over the visual direction of the project. If someone is interested, I can definitely work on making it easier for you to make new units/unit graphics. Please let me know if you are interested!

Excellent question, and one that I should really have an answer to by this point... I think that's a possibility, but I haven't investigated or tried it.

I might eventually have to use Cython to make things more efficient, but that implies making compilers in multiple platforms work and honestly, I didn't choose Python to have to make compilers work on multiple platforms :\

Hahahaha Well, I have to say that Starship Troopers (the movie) has some pretty strong theme going for it. It'd get pretty weird if everybody was suddenly half the height and sported massive beards

Looks like it's no go for a nice .exe file I've been looking at ways to do that, but py2exe doesn't really support Python 3, and cx_Freeze has a problem with pySFML that hasn't been solved yet. The other solution is using Cython, but that implies having proper compilers and completely changing the way the game is run, slowing development down a lot and negating many of the reasons that I chose Python to begin with

I'll look into it more seriously as the game nears release status. I'd really like this to be accessibly to people.

Thanks a ton for trying! Hell, it feels good to know it runs on someone else's computer!

There's super little to do, but you should be able pan the camera with right click, zoom with mousewheel, select and order the Terran troops around. I've included all the usual RTS selection stuff, like shift and alt modifiers for adding to a selection and removing from a selection respectively; and double-clicking to select all units of the same type. Right-clicking issues Attack-Move orders. If you press the down arrow key, the Bugs will attack. For the love of Armok, turn your volume down before you try it. The sounds are me making funny noises at a super crappy microphone. I guess as far as "gameplay" goes, all you can do is setup you troops.

The Marines are on the outside and the Engineers are on the inside, with the backpacks. The engineer's combat capabilities suck, so keep them protected. The functionality for making them harvest the dead bodies of the bugs is implemented (and tested), but I haven't added a command for that just yet.

Besides general feedback, what I'd love right now is two things: 1) some feedback about how the interface feels right now. I don't wanna make one of those super clunky games, I'd like it to be a fairly slick experience. I can keep fine-tuning it as long as people are trying it and 2) what would like to see next? Starting from this, where do you think this should go? Give it some Bug AI to have something to play around with, or flesh out Terran content a bit more? Perhaps some buttons for a proper interface.

Also, there's .psd/png files inside the planet5521/data/ folder that you can modify, and if you know about code, feel free to browse that as well!

And again, thanks a ton for trying this out! Sorry there's not too much, but let's hope that changes soon!:)

The snipers in particular should be really easy to implement. Just copy-paste the Terran Grunt information, increase damage and decrease reload times in the .xml

One of the main things I'm wary of is adding more stuff because it's possible. We should definitely focus on a really slick, experience. What do snipers give us? There will probably always be too many bugs on screen to target a single one effectively. AoE soldiers is a good idea, but since we are always expecting massed attacks, they should, again, reduce the amount of research available from corpses.

Well, the way I envision it the Snipers would be good as a force multiplier. If you have the basic infantry to keep them protected, then they add a good bit more to your damage capabilities by being able to do large amounts of damage to single targets. However, they're vulnerable and easy for the bugs to roll over if the infantry go down. So you can't just build a ton of snipers, but having a few around can be a better use of resources than just adding in another couple of infantry.

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I also like the idea of heavy MGs that need to be deployed, but I was wondering whether that wouldn't be essentially the same as static defences. The bugs are gonna move fast enough that deploying/undeploying probably is going to be inconsequential. They stay behind, they get slaughtered!

Well, two things about this in my mind. First, it'd be a bit of a strategic choice for the player - Do I leave my MGs deployed to provide extra fire but risk them being overrun, or do I pack them up early in anticipation of a retreat? Also, you could have the Heavy gunners run away if the bugs get too close, leaving the guns to be destroyed. They'd then act like normal infantry from then on, which makes it suboptimal to risk the guns but not suicidal for the troops.

Well, the way I envision it the Snipers would be good as a force multiplier. If you have the basic infantry to keep them protected, then they add a good bit more to your damage capabilities by being able to do large amounts of damage to single targets. However, they're vulnerable and easy for the bugs to roll over if the infantry go down. So you can't just build a ton of snipers, but having a few around can be a better use of resources than just adding in another couple of infantry.

I was planning on the Bug forces being by and large an amorphous blob: lots of individual soldiers with little health. This makes snipers identifying higher value targets largely useless, except in very rare encounters. But it's clear from all the suggestions that it's worth twisting Starship Troopers cannon around a bit, and having those higher value targets, like smaller versions of the big flamer bugs as Bug artillery. That'll give them snipers a nice juicy bullseye, which may even explode and take some bugs with it!

Well, two things about this in my mind. First, it'd be a bit of a strategic choice for the player - Do I leave my MGs deployed to provide extra fire but risk them being overrun, or do I pack them up early in anticipation of a retreat? Also, you could have the Heavy gunners run away if the bugs get too close, leaving the guns to be destroyed. They'd then act like normal infantry from then on, which makes it suboptimal to risk the guns but not suicidal for the troops.

Absolutely doable. Would the middle-mouse button work even better? It's probably also easy to implement panning by going to the edges of the screen, though windowed mode doesn't help with that.

Thanks a TON for testing it, mastahcheese!

Oh, you're welcome! This is great stuff!

And yeah, the middle mouse would work, it's just my preference with some other games I play that use the left button.But mostly it's just that the right isn't very good, in my opinion, because of the confliction with orders.